There has been some talk recently about apparent bias in the way Oxford and Cambridge universities select undergraduate students, disproportionately favouring (white) students from fee-paying schools. The universities respond, with some justification, that they accept anyone who gets top grades at A level and performs well at interview, and it’s not their fault if state … Read more
I’ve recently discovered the Google Image Labeller (or Labeler as they call it) and am slightly hooked. However, I remain to be convinced that it’s of any use at all. It appears to be an attempt to improve image searching by “crowdsourcing” human cataloguing of images. It’s presented as a game. You and a random … Read more
In a discussion with my manager today I described a tendency I have to approach any new area of work by finding something in it that’s close to my previous work. Not only had my manager already noticed this problem, he’d given it a name – the Slartibartfast syndrome. It’s nice to work for someone … Read more
Over the years I’ve been at Kingswood Warren I’ve occasionally worked on projects that primarily benefit the BBC archives’ restoration work, the most successful of these being the transform PAL decoder. A while ago I was introduced to another possible restoration job – recovering colour from black & white film recordings. This is all explained … Read more
Why oh why oh why are so many websites falling victim to the current mania for Flash graphics? Obviously it’s a good way of doing complicated things like the Scrabulous game or the BBC iPlayer, but just what does it add to a straightforward static page, apart from download time and accessibility problems? The worst … Read more
I think I might be addicted to the facebook application Scrabulous. I’ve only been playing since February this year, but have become completely hooked. I’d even go so far as to say it’s the one thing that makes facebook worth bothering with. Like many others, my first thought on seeing Scrabulous was “how are they … Read more
I’ve been mulling over an article from the Sunday Times for more than a week now, and I still don’t know what to make of it. It’s a report of an interview with Zarin Patel, the BBC’s director of finance, which says: “Patel will also examine the future of BBC’s research and innovation centre, which … Read more
Had an interesting day last Friday setting up machines in an outside broadcast van to record a dozen HD camera feeds of the 6 Nations England Wales rugby match on Saturday. This is for the iview project. This creates a moving 3D computer model from several camera views, which can then be rendered from (almost) … Read more